Remember Arkanoid and Breakout? Those use a paddle to reflect a ball that has to hit all bricks in a level that can be destroyed to reach the next one type of games? I always liked to play those games if they would feature enough extras and interesting levels to make it worthwhile.

Many clones nowadays come without extras and boring levels. Aztec Bricks brings some fresh content to the paddle-ball-brick genre by introducing a different sort of bricks that can be destroyed. It’s basically what you see you can destroy with beautiful levels that resemble structures of the Aztec culture.

The game has been created by the same company that created the Eldorado Puzzle game. You can expect a high quality game with unique ideas. I like puzzle games that lock levels until the user reaches a certain point in the game and Aztec Bricks does a very good job at it. The user has to beat levels before new ones are unlocked, that’s great for motivation.

The paddle of the player can be moved with the mouse and the ball plus extras are activated by the left mouse buttons. You find your usual assortment of extras like smaller and bigger paddles, sticky balls, multiple balls and cannons. A unique idea is that they stack with each other which means that you can catch an extra to extend the paddle and the next extra of the same kind would extend it just a bit more. Same works for pretty much all the extras like multiple balls. Becomes a bit complex if you have 10 balls flying around in the level though..

You see lots of effects on the screen up to the point where it’s to much, at least for me. Witness lightnings, fireballs and other effects that ripple through the screen. Oh and yeah, it’s another one of those girlfriend games.

eldorado puzzle

Eldorado Puzzle belongs to a group of games that I causally refer to as girlfriend games, you know, those type of games that girlfriends usually like and play a lot. It reminds me a bit of Dynomit although the game mechanics are different. You do however collect parts of ancient artifacts throughout the game.

The game is available for free download at the developers homepage. I find it a bit surprising that such a high quality game is not a commercial game. Graphics, game play and motivation are top notch and on pair with games like Dynomite.

It combines an addictive gameplay with enough variation to keep the player playing without boring him to death after a while. Game modes are mixed throughout the levels and the first few contain introductions of various game elements.

eldorado puzzle

All evolve from the same basic concept though. The task of the player is to gather the artifacts that are hidden in the levels. The game board itself is made up of squares that contain various symbols. When those symbols are connected to the same type they vanish and everything on top falls down to fill the gaps.

One of the most common game modes is to remove symbols from every square of the game board at least once and most of the other modes make use of this basic mode as well.

A variety of this topic is to guide one or two avatars on a path on the game board so that they can reach a certain destination which is usually a switch of some sort. Add keys, doors, dynamite, fire and several other items to the mix and you got a pretty solid understanding of the game.

It’s a time based game which is not a huge problem in the first levels. It is starting to get a bit more complicated from level 4 on which is usually caused by board layouts that are more difficulty to play with

I’m only playing one game at the moment and that game is Team Fortress 2. It reminds me a lot of my favorite shooter of all time Unreal Tournament. While gameplay is different the fun is the same and that’s what counts in the end, at least for me.

One thing though that is annoying the hell out of me are the objective popups that appear for a certain time at map start. They contain general information about the objective of the map and are located at the center of the screen blocking part of the view.

Those popups remain for an undisclosed amount of time, I think it must be somewhere near 10-15 seconds. It’s real nasty because they cannot be removed after they appeared. No weapon switching or hotkey removes the popup.

I had to research that topic for quite a while before I came up with a solution. The file viewed.res contains all the information that we need. You find reference to any map that you ever played in Team Fortress 2 in there along with a number. That number seems to reflect the times the map was played already.

All that needs to be done is to increase that number to a value of 50 or greater to remove the objective popups from appearing for that map. Yes, it has to be done for all maps if you want to get rid of the popups and again if you play a map for the first time.

If 50 is really the play count before the popup disappears I have to say that this is way to high and that Valve should definitely provide a key to remove the popup and an option to turn that feature off completely.

Totem Destroyer reminds me a little bit of the excellent Nintendo Wii game Boom Blox. In it the player has to destroy a certain number of blocks that hold a golden totem on the top. The difficulty of the game comes from the rule that the totem cannot hit the ground. If it does it is game over and the player has to try the map again.

The game consists of 25 levels and only three different types of blocks. This is enough to create an interesting addictive puzzle game though.

Totem Destroyer is solely played with the mouse. The player can use the left mouse button to destroy one brick at a time. It takes a while before he can use that function again and gravity takes it toll in the meantime.

Interesting game albeit a little bit short. The game saves the progress and the player can continue where he left of.